Why do so many viruses originate in China?

[ohhkay]

Please explain why SARS, Coronavirus and Swine flu have all started in a similar area.

Is it because the country is very large? Is it due to the large population?

Or is it selection bias?

Many other countries are densely populated with poor living conditions. And wet markets are not solely confined to China.

I'm genuinely curious, not racist.

Meant to say I think it is diseases that cross from animals to humans that are the ones we need to be careful about, therefore the proximity in which people and animals live are relvant here.

Selling live animals in France will be a far cry from dogs being blowtorched alive in China ( suggest you don't google that ) . The conditions in these places are atrocious .

I would also think that there are different level of animal welfare (or rather a lack of) in China, Africa etc. They don't have defra. They don't have any regulations or vaccination procedure for the food chain.

foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/27/dont-blame-bat-soup-for-the-wuhan-virus/

Why have we not closed our borders.

No animal welfare laws.
Poor hygeine
Eating an abundance of wild animals not suited for human consumption.

I wasn't comparing eating animals alive with selling them in French markets. Another poster described "animals in small cages lined up along the streets in the markets, all waiting for someone to buy, kill and eat them" and I pointed out that that is normal in many countries, and said that other factors were in play.

MIght simply be because it is so vast and contains so many people that anything that starts there is labeled as 'comes from China' whereas for say Europe we would not use the label 'comes from Europe' but instead say Scottish, French, Swiss etc etc.

I have lived in China for 12 years and hygiene standards can be quite low. I have not seen caged animals, wild or otherwise, in my local market. I have been to more remote areas of China where meat is sold in markets and not refrigerated, flies buzzing around etc, but have seen similar in Vietnam, cambodia, etc.

"You would think banning the consumption of bats, improving animal welfare would be a very easy fix for the Chinese govt to implement."

It really wouldn't. China is a huge country.

densely populated

megletthesecond - Surely it would be easier than building a hospital in 5 days/grounding flights.

Wuhan, like many Chinese cities, has a lot of pharmaceutical companies. Just google it. These are not regulated as much as here. All kinds of bizarre tissue cultures with human and animal DNA are created and waste is dumped.

I don't think it is population density. China is a massive country and its population density is actually much lower than the UK.

Did you know ground squirrels in the US cause small outbreaks of Bubonic Plague? & that here in the UK we have had: "Mad Cow" disease caused by feeding vegetarian cows with meat contaminated food (scrapy sheep I think) or foot & mouth disease caused by a unhygienic practice at a farm? Or the egg scandal with (?) listeria? People in the countryside of China farm very intensively & live closely with each other & their animals - its called cross infection - than you get mutations & people infect other people. Bacteria & viruses populate the world all over & could be said to be the main population

The OP posted this for us to discuss and exchange opinions and ideas.
I don't know why some people on mumsnet have to be so confrontational and unpleasant.

Because it's often when humans consume wildlife that has contracted the virus already. HIV, SARs, etc.

Isn't the issue with bats actually that their urine gets on fruit, and in places where washing fruit in water is neither easy nor effective due to water quality, people catch things from eating the fruit?

I live in Germany and am not allowed to give blood here as I lived in the UK until 1992 and might give someone mad cow disease...

China has 18% of the world’s population. Even with no other factors, this would mean it’s likely a higher percentage of viruses would occur within such a large population.

A combination of hygiene issues, densely populated urban areas, eating animals which carry disease and crowded conditions leading to germs breeding, I'm guessing. Don't wet markets have live and dead animals sold together in close proximity? Isn't that really risky?

But researchers of zoonotic diseases — diseases that jump from animals to humans – pinpoint the wet markets in mainland China as particularly problematic for several reasons. First, these markets often have many different kinds of animals – some wild, some domesticated but not necessarily native to that part of Asia. The stress of captivity in these chaotic markets weakens the animals' immune systems and creates an environment where viruses from different species can mingle, swap bits of their genetic code and spread from one species to another, according to biologist Kevin Olival, vice president for research at the EcoHealth Alliance. When that happens, occasionally a new strain of an animal virus gets a foothold in humans and an outbreak like this current coronavirus erupts.

Rest of the article if you want to read about wet markets - but the above just about sums it up.

www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/01/31/800975655/why-theyre-called-wet-markets-and-what-health-risks-they-might-pose

When the wet market conditions in Wuhan were tested for the new coronovirus, they not only found coronvirus in approx 48 humans who'd been in and around the market, some selling, some buying, they also found samples in approx 56 samples of the meat itself being sold. (Sorry don't have article as source so numbers are from memory)

I think that came as a shock. Well it did to me. Shows how fast and how prevalent/infectious the virus is. It can spread and spread easily across many mammals.

And another fascinating one about China's preference for 'warm' meat. Not chilled or frozen like in the West. They like to eat the animal freshly slaughtered, not pre-packaged. This adds to the potential for disease.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/23/appetite-for-warm-meat-drives-risk-of-disease-in-hong-kong-and-china

You would think banning the consumption of bats, improving animal welfare would be a very easy fix for the Chinese govt to implement.

Lots of things are illegal and still happen all over the world. Banning things doesn't stop people doing them. And black markets exist to bypass quality standards.

Spitting .

Chinese people habitually spit onto the road.
If that is in a live animal market you get circular transmission of that bit of gob
so the virus load increases.

The Government is trying to clamp down on it but the habit runs deep.

Horrific animal welfare